A vibration disrupts the silence.
“I-I’m getting another call,” Emi stammers, her unsteady voice grating my raw nerves. “I don’t know the number.”
A beat passes before Dantë barks, “Answer it, Remiel.”
“Okay, okay, l-let me bridge the call.” Never has a moment felt like an eternity. “H-hello?”
First, I hear the lighter. Then the modified voice growls, “St. Aurelius’s tomb. Tell whoever you need. This ends tonight.”
“I-I don’t understand.”
“You don’t need to understand. You need to save the last Morgensterns while they still breathe.”
Click.
My world goes mute, questions circling my skull like vultures. Dantë takes my phone before I can crush it and says more to Emi. I’m not listening. Not as I crack at the seams and breathe decimation.
Nikolai settles a hand on my shoulder. “She needs you.”
I need you,Poppy once said to me.
She. Needs.Me.
“Emi,” I say, grabbing a mask, “can you tap into our comms?”
“Already here,” she reports in our ears.
“Parfait.I need you to call Bax. Tell him to meet us at Indigo with as much dynamite as he can get his pyromaniac hands on.”
“On it.”
I turn to the black panther who looks just as bloodthirsty as me.
“Oh, Jezebel.” I grin wide as my sanity catapults into another dimension. The one where I’m Scythe, on a mission to flay skin from bone and make it fuckinghurt.“How hungry are you for sinners’ flesh?”
Jezebel yowls, a murderous gleam in her hellfire eyes.
CLICHÉ
Poppy
The quiet, steady crackle of burning wood slowly drags me up from an endless abyss.
Memories flash through my mind like strobe lights: frescoes; mismatched eyes; a serpent that had been lying in the shade and waiting to strike.
Quinn.
A lion wearing lamb’s skin.
Fury ignites in my veins, burning me awake. I wrench myself out of the drug’s grip, only to be choked by a collar clamped tight around my throat. Chains wrap my body from ankles to shoulders. My spine is straight as a sword, my boots planted on a slab of wood.
Am I chained to a fucking pyre?
Adrenaline dumps through my system as I frantically absorb my surroundings. I’m in the middle of St. Aurelius’s necropolis, centered on the pentagram carved into the stone floor. The wall sconces are lit, popping merrily in the undercroft of Leviathan’s founding families. Smoke and the stench of burned flesh clogs the air, thick as fog. Ash and soot stain the floor in patches, as if…
As if this is where Leviathan has been taking my family.
Andburningthem to death.
